Forever disappointed

I always have unwarrantedly high expectations of creationists. I know that there are some flamingly ignorant nutjobs out there, all your Hams and Hovindses and Luskins, but lurking in my mind is always this suspicion that somewhere there has to be one or two biologically competent ideologues on their side of the fence. And I am always disappointed.

For example, there’s this one fellow, Douglas Axe, who has a legitimate and well-earned doctoral degree in chemical engineering, and several published papers in real science journals (not the fake journals creationists create). The Discovery Institute tapped him to head their Biologic Institute, their attempt to create an organization that would do genuine biological research (it hasn’t, so far). And I thought, hey, maybe this guy at last is a worthy opponent.

But let’s be honest here. I have no illusions that I’m a super-mega-genius, or that I have high standing as a researcher in my field. I’m a grunt in the army of biology, not an officer. So I can imagine someone smarter than me in opposition; I certainly know many on my side who are far more accomplished and intelligent than I am. So you can imagine my disappointment at looking over Axe’s ideas and seeing that he, too, is an incompetent twit.

I was really shocked when he revealed that he didn’t understand coalescence theory at all. It may be a bit esoteric for the lay public, but if you’re a critic of genomics and population genetics, you must at least comprehend the basics. And he doesn’t.

And now he lets me down again. The Biologic Institute is putting out some fresh horror of pseudoscience, a book called Science and Human Origins, in which they presumably bring all their scientific guns to bear in order to question human evolution. And what do they do? They question the evidence of a fusion of chromosome two, something I’ve hammered on Luskin before. And they bumble it up completely.

This stuff isn’t that hard. I’ve explained the basics of synteny, or conserved linkage blocks; fragments of chromosomes are constantly getting shuffled about, inverted, duplicated, and deleted, and we can compare chromosome structure between two species and see exactly how they’ve been juggled. These movements leave traces, and are mechanically well understood; we can see the evidence right therein the sequences.

So Carl Zimmer engaged the Biologic Institute ideologues on their facebook page. They denied that a fusion had occured, and claimed that the evidence was actually against such an event. So Zimmer hit them right where they’re weakest: he asked them to cite that evidence. And what did they do? You know it, it’s familiar. They went dumb and stopped answering. They couldn’t answer the basic question. And this is why I’m vaguely disappointed. Even their self-proclaimed science stars can’t explain something a small-town teaching professor in the Midwest can see laid out plainly in the data.

One benefit, though, is that Carl Zimmer summarized the whole affair in a must-read post. He explains step by step with simple cartoons every event that occurred in the chromosomal fusion, and what the molecular evidence for the phenomenon is. And he shows up the creationists for frauds who won’t address a simple question of sources.

For added hilarity, David Klinghoffer of Evolution News & Views, the DI’s dishonest propaganda organ, has challenged Carl to debate the issue. I don’t know what there is to debate; Gauger, Axe, and Luskin claim there is evidence against a chromosome fusion in human history, Carl asked what it was, and they refused to give it.

So he flatly turned them down, as was sensible to do. Debating creationists is a waste of time. Now that refusal is getting trolled by creationists, accusing him of being ‘afraid’ to debate…and I still don’t know what he’s supposed to argue about. Did the Discovery Institute refuse to cite any evidence supporting their claim? Yes. We’re done.

And my quest for an honest, scientifically competent creationist continues, fruitlessly.

This is why I could never be an anthropologist

Somedays, it’s just awful to have the mind of a 12 year old boy. So I’m reading this serious and interesting paper on Neandertals, and learn something new.

Two particular characteristics have received considerable attention; pronounced humeral diaphysis strength asymmetry and anteroposteriorly strengthened humeral diaphyseal shape. In particular, humeral bilateral asymmetry for cross-sectional area, and torsional and average bending rigidity, appear exceptionally high in Neandertals (averaging 24–57%) compared to skeletal samples of modern Holocene H. sapiens (averaging 5–14%).

That’s science-speak for “Neandertals had massively muscular right arms compared to their left.” And my mind went right into the gutter.

Anthropologists had their own less juvenile explanations: their strong right arms were a response to extreme muscular activity of repetitive thrusting (ack, back into the gutter) with long, heavy spears (slap me hard.) The paper, though, analyzed muscular activity in experimental subjects who made spear thrusts while hooked up to loads of instrumentation, and discovered that, contrary to their expectations, it was the left arm, the off hand, that carried the largest load in stabilizing the thrust. So that hypothesis simply doesn’t work.

So they tested an alternative explanation, and it wasn’t the first one that leapt to my mind. One of the most common kinds of tools found at Neandertal sites are scrapers —if you’re using hides for clothing and shelter, there is a lot of processing involved — prolonged, repetitive scraping motions while stripping excess flesh from the underside of skins. I imagine scraping a mammoth skin is a huge endeavor that does involve a lot of work. They reviewed ethnographic studies, and discovered that processing a single cow hide, for instance, takes 6-10 hours of work. So they hooked up their test subjects to instruments and measured muscle activity during scraping…and it matches, generating forces that could lead to a build-up of muscle and bone in the right arm.

Unfortunately for my adolescent Neandertal wanking hypothesis, though, the comparison probably doesn’t hold up. Even the most obsessive individual is going to be hard up to maintain 6-10 hours of constant activity. Rats, I guess I’m not going to be making a novel contribution to anthropology. Besides, I imagine this guess was made many times before, and for some reason never made it into print.

Shaw CN, Hofmann CL, Petraglia MD, Stock JT, Gottschall JS (2012) Neandertal Humeri May Reflect Adaptation to Scraping Tasks, but Not Spear Thrusting. PLoS ONE 7(7): e40349. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040349.

Watch out for the GMWs: Genetically Modified Women

I’ve been hoping that someone would come out and explain how this claim that women are becoming smarter than men was accomplished. I need to know the scenario and the mechanism, so I’ve developed a few of my own that I hope to see appearing soon in the Daily Mail.

  • Late at night, when no one was looking, UFOs have been abducting our women and enslaving them in the Love Factories on Mars (because as we all know, Mars Needs Women). So that we don’t catch on, they’ve been replacing them with femdroids with cybernetic brains that are very good at cheating on tests.

  • Beginning in about 1980, all female infants were selectively injected with a Communist mind control virus that turned them into soulless, freedom-hating machines who were good at gymnastics and engineering. When the time is ripe, their programming will be activated and they will rise up to overthrow Western running dog democracies.

  • The government has top secret labs where clone babies with enhanced genetically engineered intelligence are being raised. Only females are used in this project for technical cloning reasons. They’ve been swapping out normal babies in maternity wards and replacing them with these Humanity 2.0 versions for years.

  • Big Pharma has been testing brain-enhancing drugs by hiding them in birth control pills. The recent results are the consequence of clandestine human trials. Little known, related fact: they’re also doping Viagra with a stupidity drug.

  • A select team of exceptionally intelligent pick-up artists have been using their talents to inseminate a majority of women around the world, cuckolding all the dumber men, and increasing the frequency of their super-smart alleles in the population to a remarkable degree. They also all fortuitously carry a Y-dominant allele that causes defective Y-bearing sperm, so all of their children are female. Which increases the frequency of babes, schwing!

Unfortunately, there’s one little problem with those scenarios: they’re all ridiculous, requiring large-scale changes in the genetic composition of a world-wide population numbering in the billions within a few generations, and that all of the positive changes would be selective for one sex. You simply can’t argue in any coherent way that women are becoming smarter than men or that women are the smarter sex. You can reasonably say that the evidence shows that women have higher IQ scores than men now.

Because, as I’ve been saying for a long time, there’s a difference between IQ scores and the actual potential for knowledge, learning, and that general poorly defined thing we call ‘intelligence’.

What this current study by James Flynn of worldwide intelligence test scores actually shows is that a) whatever intelligence tests measure is plastic, b) the variation in those scores is not a measure of biological limitations (although I’d argue that our intelligence is a biologically human property), and c) shifting cultural environments can induce relatively rapid changes in the responses of developing human minds.

Women aren’t getting smarter. They have the same biological properties in this generation that they had in the previous generation, and the generation before that. What’s changing is a culture that allows women to slip free of sociological limitations at a young age and encourages them to practice using those brains. Their grandmothers were just as smart, but were molded in ways that limited expression of their intelligence. I also suspect that there are factors emerging which are imposing limits on male behavior and experiences — there are some troubling signs that some social expectations are imposing a new kind of stereotype threat on men.

Of course, there is some anecdotal counter-evidence. I have a daughter who went from being totally reliant on Mommy and Daddy to being an independent young woman, almost overnight. The alien pod-person/cybernetic brain implant/radical brain-enhancement doping theories do have some attractiveness.

Camille Marino is probably going to jail

Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called “Negotiation is Over”. NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.

Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you’re thinking? That does cause one’s knee to jerk.

But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She’s been ordered to stay away from the researchers she threatens, but then she travels to their university to harass them — that sounds like stalking to me.

The situation here is that Marino’s got nation-wide bands of dedicated followers, those followers have in the past shown a willingness to undertake violent, destructive action on behalf of their cause, and Marino has been actively inciting others to kill researchers. You want an example? Here’s an example, and it’s also a great example of her incoherent state of mind.

The image on this page [a chalk outline labeled “animal abuser was here”] is not a cute logo. It is my personal belief that if you are a sadistic animal torturer, that is all you deserve – a chalk outline. That’s my opinion, not a threat. It’s not even inciting anyone because, unless you read my words and run out and murder David Jenstch (sic) (an idea that amuses me immensely), I’m not responsible. If you have time to think about it and form your own conclusions, my words cease being the impetus. Eh, that used to be the law at least. Who knows? Who cares? We have a job to do and that’s all that matters…. NIO is no longer mincing words. This is war!… Nothing is off limits at NIO!

…

if there are no consequences, there is no threat. If you spill blood, your blood should be spilled as well…. Some of the more high profile pacifists have said that I am “violent” and “unbalanced”. I think they finally may be right about something!

If I have my way, you’ll be praying to us for mercy!

It’s just her “opinion”, she’s not inciting anyone — she would just be amused by David Jentsch being murdered by someone who read her suggestion to go murder him. She’s not responsible, she’s just telling everyone that researchers’ blood should be spilled, and that nothing is off limits.

She’s a danger to others. It’s good news that she’s being constrained to protect the citizenry.

Pharyngula Podcast #3

We had another fun Google+ Hangout this morning with Esteleth, James Rook, Tommy Leung, and Yankee Cynic, building on a couple of articles I mentioned before. Basically, we talked about the attractiveness of the premises of evolutionary psychology vs. the extravagance of their conclusions, and the unreliability of brains and how we have to work hard to overcome them. It turned into a kind of discussion about psychology, of all things.

And now you can watch it all, too.

Isn’t it amazing how you can assemble a small group of people, give them the seed of an idea, and then they can go on to talk about it for an hour, easy?

We’ll probably do another one in about two weeks. Make suggestions! I’m also planning to do the next one at sometime in my local evening, so maybe we can bring in an Australian or two.

And everyone gets a robot pony!

Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:

The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.

If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation

It won’t. It can’t.

I read the paper he recommended: it’s by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is slice a brain up thin and “scan” it with sufficient resolution, and then we can just build a model of the brain.

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.

We don’t have a method to lock down the state of a 1.5kg brain. What you’re going to be recording is the dying brain, with cells spewing and collapsing and triggering apoptotic activity everywhere.

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…

Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly

You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.

I’m not anti-AI; I think we are going to make great advances in the future, and we’re going to learn all kinds of interesting things. But reverse-engineering something that is the product of almost 4 billion years of evolution, that has been tweaked and finessed in complex and incomprehensible ways, and that is dependent on activity at a sub-cellular level, by hacking it apart and taking pictures of it? Total bollocks.

If singularitarians were 19th century engineers, they’d be the ones talking about our glorious future of transportation by proposing to hack up horses and replace their muscles with hydraulics. Yes, that’s the future: steam-powered robot horses. And if we shovel more coal into their bellies, they’ll go faster!